Seung Yul Oh's Playful Painted Peripheries
Seung Yul Oh references plant science in an exhibition that is so minimal and restrained as to make the connection seem incongruous. But it isn't.
Exhibition view: Seung Yul Oh, Guttation, ONE AND J. Gallery, Seoul (23 June–23 July 2023). Courtesy the artist and ONE AND J. Gallery. Photo: artifacts.
The Auckland-based artist has long been interested in activating space, playing with boundaries and the movement of energy. In this context, the title of his latest exhibition, Guttation at ONE AND J. Gallery in Seoul (23 June–23 July 2023), makes complete sense.
'Guttation' is one of nature's means of distributing material form. The term refers to the secretion of liquid droplets from the pores of certain plants.
Droplets produced by guttation are not to be confused with dew, the condensation of moisture in the air onto a plant's surface. By contrast, guttation is the discharge of excess water and minerals—a sort of natural, plant-based painting. Fittingly, Oh's Guttation is a show that plays with the structures of painting.
Spanning the walls of ONE AND J.'s lower level is Interval Periphery (2023), an installation in which each wall's edges are painted with wedge-like slivers of two or three different colours. Bold hues of blue, purple, yellow, pink, brown, cream, grey, and green make up Oh's palette, and each wall edge is paired with various combinations.
By virtue of their existence, the frames of Interval Periphery capture space within their boundaries. Yet there are no 'pictures' in the middle—at least in the conventional sense of shapes and forms created by applying paint to a surface. Oh's act of framing nevertheless gives rise to a defined space, centring the neutral white walls of the gallery so that they become the surface of a painting, or alternatively, open into an imagined distance while the frames act as windows.
Upstairs, Oh doubles down on framing with Fortuitous Sonority (2023), a remake of an existing work damaged during transit from Auckland to Seoul. The original painting frames the outermost edge of the canvas with straight bands of gold, brown, red, and deep beige. Inside these boundaries, Oh painted in a second set of frames, consisting of angular wedges akin to those of Interval Periphery, and filled the space inside with horizontal planes of red and blue-green.
Interval Periphery and Fortuitous Sonority represent a continuation of Oh's experimentation with frames that can be traced back to earlier works such as Composition (2013) or Periphery (2015), in which each edge of the canvas is painted in different colours.
In 'Sonority' (2022), shown at Oh's solo exhibition Huggong-Monologue at Starkwhite last year, paintings comprised two horizontal planes and thin slivers of colour framing the canvas, engaging boundaries and the space within them in a dialogue with colour and motion.
Unlike many of Oh's previous exhibitions, Guttation does not contain the toy-like sculptures or interventions the artist has become known for. These have included Huggong-Monologue (2022), the 100-metres-long, bright pink PVC inflatable that stretched across the ground floor of Starkwhite, and Periphery (2013), a series of cylindrical yellow inflatables that filled a room in his City Gallery Wellington retrospective, Moamoa, in 2014. Yet the artist's preoccupation remains related in Guttation, where he addresses spatial interventions and boundaries, even in an exhibition that appears firmly two-dimensional and wall-based.
Among Oh's new works upstairs are watercolours on paper, where circles are arranged in interlocking formations. Pink and red circular forms weave in and out of one another in Smouldering Cumulus_WR01 (2023), with the lack of logic in their arrangement suggesting continuous and conflicting movement as they huddle together like molecules.
To its left, Wring_WB01 (2023) is formed from many circles in different shades of blue that make up a larger circle. Without a distinct end or beginning, the form rolls by and within itself, perpetually in motion and maintaining space.
Circles burst beyond the frame in the next room, where Aero Globule (2023) sees smaller dots of watercolour on paper scattered about the walls. On opening day, Oh likened them to the droplets splattered on bathroom mirrors or the busy pedestrians of Seoul he observed during his stay in Korea. The spherical and egg-like forms of Oh's past projects SOOM (2014) or Ode (2010) also come to mind, as do the droplets that form on plants.
In Guttation, the circles bounce back and forth in their independent, irregular rhythms, but their placements are not completely random—the wall by the exit flaunts just five dots, with one in each corner and the fifth in the centre, establishing an order. This sense of logic is made stronger by the contrasting inconsistency of the dots on the surrounding walls.
Singularity is most apparent when there are differences. Oh builds structural tension with frames and spinning circles, introducing constrictions and boundaries to define space. —[O]
